Careless People: how power destroys empathy
Laetitia@Work #83
Hi everyone,
It’s summer so I can finally take the time to read the books 📚 I’ve been meaning to read for months. In my to-read list was Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn Williams, a former Facebook employee. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a great account of the carelessness of the tech bros that generated the Trumpian world we now live in.
Her memoir offers a front-row seat to Facebook’s transformation (or enshittification), chronicling her seven years inside Facebook (now Meta) as it evolved from a (mostly) idealistic startup that pretended to “connect people” into what she describes as an engine of “lethal carelessness.”
Of course, with hindsight, one can challenge the idea that Facebook was ever an idealistic startup (after all, it was first created as a tool to grade people’s hotness). But what’s certain is that at several specific points in the history of the company, choices were made that indicate a complete disregard for human rights or basic decency and that greed (growth at all costs) came before everything else.
As they became more and more powerful, as their apps scaled to reach billions of users, Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes (notably Sheryl Sandberg) lost touch with their humanity. Extreme wealth and influence don't just corrupt—they literally rewire the human brain in ways that mirror psychopathy.
When growth and profit become the only goals, everything else gets sacrificed. To grow at all costs, Facebook decided it had to:
amplify rage, resentment, and fake news for engagement;
strike deals with dictators and hand over user data;
weaponise “free speech” as a tool for expansion;
ignore the suffering of its employees.
Here are a few takeaways from the book—mixed with some of my own reflections.💡👇
The neuroscience of absolute power
The saying "power corrupts" has ancient roots, but modern neuroscience reveals the biological mechanisms behind this corruption. Research shows that people primed with power show decreased activity in brain regions associated with empathy and perspective-taking.
In experiments, participants who had been made to feel powerful showed less "mirroring" when watching videos of other people's actions. Mirror neurons normally fire both when we perform an action and when we observe others performing the same action—it's part of how we understand and empathise with others.
But power quite literally switches off this empathetic response. Hence, the brains of powerful individuals react differently to social cues in ways that resemble psychopaths. The powerful become less accurate at judging others' emotions and more likely to rely on stereotypes rather than seeing people as individuals.
👉 ALSO WATCH this video I made in French about the effects of power on the brain:
This isn't metaphorical corruption—it's measurable brain change. And nowhere are these changes more visible than in Wynn-Williams's intimate portrait of Facebook's leadership.
Move fast and break things
New Zealander Wynn-Williams joined Facebook in 2011 as an idealistic former diplomat who believed “the platform was going to change the world.” She pitched herself to the company for months, convinced she could help them navigate the complex political landscape as governments were not yet beginning to understand Facebook's power. When the company finally hired her, she was elated: “I can't believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of my lifetime.”
What she discovered inside was a leadership structure that had already begun showing the neural hallmarks of power corruption. Mark Zuckerberg, she observed, was “desperate to be liked” and increasingly “hungry for attention and adulation.” During a tour of Asia, she was directed to gather crowds of over a million so that he could be “gently mobbed.”
More troubling was Zuckerberg's growing disconnection from the human consequences of his platform's reach. “Moving fast and breaking things” was a philosophy as well as a coding practice. Today, with hindsight, this phrase “move fast and break things” is seen for what it is: incredibly toxic. Indeed it has had deadly consequences.
In Myanmar, Facebook's platform became a vector for genocide against the Rohingya people. Wynn-Williams had raised alarms about hate speech circulating on the platform years earlier, but Facebook's content moderation was painfully inadequate—the company relied on a single Burmese-speaking contractor based in Dublin, multiple time zones away from both Myanmar and Facebook's California headquarters.
“Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it's truly ubiquitous,” she writes. Yet the company's response remained focused on technical solutions rather than human ones, treating genocide as a content moderation problem to be solved with better algorithms rather than a moral crisis requiring immediate human intervention.
The Sheryl Sandberg paradox
Perhaps nowhere is the gap between public persona and private reality more stark than in Wynn-Williams's portrait of Sheryl Sandberg. The author of Lean In, who positioned herself as a champion of women in the workplace, presided over what the author describes as a very toxic environment for female employees.
The cognitive dissonance was painful. Sandberg would turn her charm “on and off like a tap,” demanding “obedience and closeness” beneath her public feminist messaging. Sandberg allegedly instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for both of them, and insisted on inappropriate physical intimacy during business travel (probably embodying a grotesque, out-of-touch vision of sisterhood).
When Wynn-Williams nearly died during childbirth from an amniotic fluid embolism, requiring life support and a medically necessary coma, work demands continued unabated. Her manager Joel Kaplan—described as a former Marine and Republican operative—gave her a performance review on her first day back, criticising her for not being “responsive enough” while she was literally fighting for her life on maternity leave.
This disconnect between public advocacy and private behaviour illustrates this fact about power: it makes people less able to see the perspectives of others while increasing their confidence in their own moral righteousness. Sandberg could genuinely believe she was advancing women's causes while simultaneously creating conditions that drove talented women out of the company.
Over the years, Facebook—now Meta—has faced repeated allegations of fostering a workplace culture where misogyny, harassment, and discrimination against women are widespread. Reports from former employees, lawsuits, and investigations have pointed to patterns of sexual harassment, dismissive attitudes toward women in leadership, and a lack of meaningful accountability for perpetrators. Despite public commitments to diversity and inclusion, Meta has often been criticised for protecting powerful men within the company while sidelining or silencing women who speak out.
On top of this, the company's demanding work culture—where 60- to 80-hour workweeks are normalised—makes it especially difficult for parents, and particularly mothers, to thrive. The expectation of constant availability clashes with caregiving responsibilities, reinforcing a system that sidelines women in the workplace.
In short, the “feminist” advice and mantras of a billionaire executive who’s always had the help of countless nannies and servants is of little help to regular female employees. Worse, they may have added insult to injury, making these women feel worthless for not “leaning in” and “sitting at the table”, putting the blame on them, rather than tackling the toxic culture making their success so fraught.
The China files: when "Free Speech" actually means censorship
Perhaps the most damning parts in Wynn-Williams's book concern Facebook's secret project to enter the Chinese market. Despite public statements about supporting free speech and democratic values, Facebook was privately developing censorship tools and data-sharing arrangements that would satisfy the demands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In many ways, the hypocritical way Facebook weaponised the free speech argument foreshadows Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter-X and the advent of Trump II. While Zuckerberg testified before Congress about Facebook's commitment to free expression, the company was simultaneously developing mechanisms to silence Chinese dissidents. When Chinese exile Guo Wengui used Facebook to broadcast attacks on the CCP, the platform shut down his account following behind-the-scenes pressure from Beijing.
Wynn-Williams describes how Facebook's leadership crafted “cleverly worded talking points” to mislead Congress about their China activities. When a senator asked Zuckerberg directly about Facebook's willingness to operate under Chinese censorship, he replied that “no decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China.” “He lies,” she writes.
There is a pattern here: making public proclamations about democratic values and coupling them with secret accommodations to authoritarian regimes.
Mountainhead isn’t far off
A few weeks ago I watched the film Mountainhead (on Max), a satirical comedy-drama about four billionaire friends who meet at a remote mountain house while the world is falling apart due to AI-driven disinformation spread by a social media platform (fictitious Traam in the film). The film's premise—three billionaires whose social media platform has unleashed chaos through deepfake technology—feels less like science fiction than documentary preview today.
In Armstrong's satire, the tech titans fantasise about taking over “failing nations” and running them like startups. “We intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto network states, populations love it, and it snowballs,” one character explains. When that proves insufficient, they consider more direct action: “Do we just get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up and coup out the U.S.?”
The film's power lies in its recognition that these men aren't necessarily evil masterminds—they're just fantastically arrogant and ineffective outside their tech domains. Like Wynn-Williams's portrait of Facebook leadership, they combine vast power with stunning ignorance about the world they're reshaping (destroying). They literally don’t know what they’re doing. They are fantastically careless and devoid of empathy.
The algorithmic amplification of chaos
In some ways, the neurological changes that come with extreme power explain why platforms designed to “connect the world” became engines of division and violence. Leaders whose empathy circuits have been dampened by wealth and influence naturally gravitate toward metrics that ignore human suffering—engagement, growth, user acquisition—while remaining blind to the human cost.
Facebook's algorithm, designed to maximise user attention, inevitably amplified content that triggered strong emotional responses: rage, fear, resentment, and outrage. The platform discovered that fake news spreads six times faster than true information, but rather than seeing this as a problem to solve, leadership treated it as user preference to satisfy.
The result was a global experiment in social manipulation. Brexit. Trump's first election. The January 6th insurrection. The fast rise of the Rassemblement national in France and AFD in Germany. Trump’s second election. And many more chaotic world events in all parts of the world. Each of these events and phenomena illustrates the platform's extraordinary ability to weaponise human psychology for “engagement”, with devastating consequences for democratic institutions worldwide.
Carelessness is evil
Again, what makes Wynn-Williams's account of Facebook’s leaders so disturbing isn't just the presence of calculated malevolence—it's the total absence of curiosity about the consequences of their actions. Facebook’s leaders know very little about the world. And they don’t care. There is no machiavellian conspiracy so much as carelessness and cynicism on an unprecedented scale.
The neuroscience of power suggests that the problem isn't primarily individual bad actors but structural arrangements that concentrate vast wealth and influence in the hands of people whose brains get rewired to lack empathy.
No amount of corporate diversity training or ethics workshops will suffice here. Only the strongest regulation. Breaking these monopolies so this unprecedented concentration of power can no longer be possible. And creating accountability mechanisms that don't depend on the voluntary good intentions of a few people.
In the end, Careless People is both memoir and warning—a reminder that in our connected world, a few individuals do a lot of evil. The world is most definitely a worse place because of them. The evil they cause is because they don’t give a shit.
💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote many new articles (in French):
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🎙️ I recorded an episode of the THUNE podcast (in French), hosted by Laurence Vély, to discuss my recent report for the Fondation des Femmes on the hidden costs of female seniority in the workplace. We discussed how ageism and sexism combine to penalise women as they grow older, often leading to significant income gaps and increased vulnerability. We also talked about the solutions that can help ensure women don’t grow older only to end up poorer.
🎙️ I joined Faustine Duriez on the Yes We Care podcast (in French) to talk about how, despite RTO momentum, the traditional office will continue to lose its central role as a workspace. In many companies, the push to return to the office really means to mask the will to lay people off. We discussed how work is increasingly happening elsewhere: in homes, in between spaces, on the road etc. This episode is an invitation to rethink the symbolic power of the office and to explore what a more flexible, inclusive vision of work could look like.
📻 Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining the renowned French radio show Le Téléphone Sonne on France Inter, alongside labour lawyer Élise Fabing and professor Clothilde Coron, to discuss women’s experiences at work. We tackled critical issues such as menopause, career barriers, gendered discrimination, and the persistent cultural silence around women's struggles in the workplace.
Miscellaneous
📚 Debunking the myth of male genius, Peter Conrad, The Observer, June 2025: “Helen Lewis devotes her angry, witty book to a narrowly polemical account of the notion and its myth-making boosters. For her, genius is “a rightwing concept”, offensive “because it champions the individual over the collective”. This special category, “somewhere between secular saint and superhero”, is not democratically open to all, and the prodigies it celebrates are for Lewis “misshapen figures”, monsters who typically mistreat their wives, neglect their children and deny credit to their collaborators. The geniuses are all men, since women, as Lewis suggests in a glance at Jane Austen, lack the requisite swagger. I think she underestimates Austen’s sense of her own importance: she described novels, her own included, as “works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed”.
Don’t become careless! 🤗
Merci Laetitia. As always a powerful summary of what we now know but with additional twists and connections. We have moved from monetising engagement to monetising intimacy. As Laetitia explains so well, none of the tech titans seem to care about the consequences as power has rewired their brains. It is not too late to be curious about tech without giving away your valuable data that feeds the beast.
Wow! Thanks for that comprehensive article that not only makes me want to read the book but also opened my eyes... Wish I could transfer it to my French-speaking friends!